


The Empty House

by cyanocorax



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-16
Updated: 2012-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-29 16:12:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanocorax/pseuds/cyanocorax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you leave the fight, and sometimes the fight leaves you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Empty House

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for 2.03
> 
> god damn that fucking episode

The bits of steel in his bag make the same sound as they always have, clacking like bones. He sets them down, hears them still, then opens the zip and takes the pieces out one at a time. They are then cleaned with methodical precision, first to last, in familiarized order. His hands find the rigid grooves and settle there; the smell of gun oil floods the room.

Some inches away sits his mobile. He spares it glances with every part of the rifle he sets aside, small, impatient huffs of air slipping out from between his lips. The silence riles him.

Finally, the screen glows pearly white. He leans forward and taps it once. On the other end, buzzing, but that is to be expected.

“Listen up,” says Sebastian Moran, setting the last piece, gleaming, alongside its brothers, “I’m going to tell you something important.”

Crackles. “We don’t answer to you,” the other end says.

He grits his teeth.

“You do now.”

“No. You are nothing. A gun.” The voice carries hints of faraway places, and it is impatient. “We signed on to work with James Moriarty. James Moriarty is dead. Our contract is null, Mr. Moran.”

“Our contract is null when _I say s_ —”

There is a click. The crackling goes away.

Sebastian sits back, calm. Simply the latest in a string of similar conversations. He doesn’t think he has it in him for another, but, best to get them out of the way.

Slowly, he puts the shining pieces of his rifle back into their bag. One after the other.

 

Supposedly, they still tell stories of his great-grandfather in Burma, and his unrivaled bag of tigers. Of how he set alight entire forests, simply to fell a solitary beast. Of how he tied a young boy to a tree to lure out a man-killer, indifferent to the child’s screams.

Sebastian’s legends are humbler by far. Perhaps in Afghanistan, veterans still tell new recruits of a loose cannon with a chip on his shoulder, sent home for fighting the wrong fight. Perhaps, in the cold underbelly of London, they still speak of his shadow, but no longer in fear, for what good is a rifle with no one to aim it, no one to whisper ‘fire.’

 

The warehouses they used to do their business are passed along. Bloodstains scrubbed clean out of the concrete; bullets dug from the wall.

He was only ever in charge of this nasty downside to Jim’s operations. The disposal of unwanted things. But for five years his bank accounts had been padded and his days had been full, and once in a blue moon Jim Moriarty would knock on his door with a box of knives and a proposition: “Darling let’s go set some woods on fire”, and sons of men who dreamed of flames in tall grass do not give up fighting simply because they have left behind the war.

And Jim, who had eyes the color of clay, who laughed like a hungry dog, who was everything— who dragged Sebastian into strange, unseen worlds— who was mad, who blasted his own brains across the concrete, who is _dead_.

Now the accounts dwindle, and his days grow long. He cleans his guns each evening, old habits, the pieces shimmering but unused, and in the morning he rises and finds new ways to waste his time.

Sebastian is angry at himself for the missing of it. He has come home to empty houses all his life; why should now be any different?

 

It is spring when he kneels at the window of a crumbling building and fixes his crosshairs on a ghostly silhouette. Outside, it has begun to rain.

He does not know why he feels he must do this, but he feels it, all the same. He pulls the burning stub of a cigarette from his mouth and places it on the dampening sill.

It smokes, smokes, flames, then is drenched, goes out.


End file.
